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Community pulse: Delphi Survey hacked (well, almost) – Part 1

Hi guys, first of all please let me tell you that we have some really interesting interviews with most of the nominees of our award! (more on the pipeline 😉 ) – be sure to check them out in the next posts. Since then, we see that all of you are occupied with the famous Delphi Survey and because this survey is really technical grade and complex please feel free to discuss, ask and comment here and / or in the newsgroups. Note that we snipped the ‘obvious / clear’ (imho) questions…

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On Page 5 the first question says: How would you rate your use of the following IDE features?

11. RAD Studio 2010 Personalities/Environment: According to your development requirements, please allocate 100 points across the following RAD Studio 2010 personalities to indicate the relative amount of support and features you would like to see Embarcadero focus on for your particular needs. Assign any amount to each personality/environment from 0 to 100, so that the total of all entries is 100.

Delphi for Win32 Personality
C++Builder Personality
Delphi Prism

12. Please indicate one other VCL feature that you would like to see added or enhanced.

13. IDE Enhancements: According to your development needs, please allocate 100 points across the following potential IDE enhancements to indicate the relative amount of support and features you would like to see Embarcadero focus on for your particular needs. Assign any amounts to each feature from 0 to 100, so that the total of all the entries is 100.

14. Please indicate one other IDE feature that you would like to see added or enhanced.

15. Embarcadero has made a significant change in the .NET strategy by introducing Delphi Prism. What are your on going requirements for compatibility between .NET and Native Delphi?

Very High – need high language compatibility between Prism and Delphi
Moderately High – help me migrate from Native to .NET
Medium – i.e. we use .NET for newer projects only, minimal code reuse
Low – i.e. I’m using .NET all I need is a similar language to Delphi

“The word itself comes from the German word meaning “someone who makes furniture with an axe”,[2] implying a lack of finesse in a “hack”; it is believed by many in the hacking community that the reason for this is because programs too large to run on the limited computer resources of the time had portions “chopped” or “hacked” out in order to be reduced to a more reasonable size.” (from Wikipedia)

I ‘chopped’ the survey in order make it more affordable for anyone if he wants to ask (for ex. ‘What Iterators mean?’ ‘What is MVC language feature?’ etc.), discuss or explain the choices (eg. ‘I voted “Don’t use/Don’t Care’ but if that feature would have the ‘x’ improvement I would definitely use it’ etc.)

Sorry, but that quote is nonsense (I also couldn’t actually find it on Wikipedia – what article is that supposed to be from?). The German verb “hacken”, has actually nothing to do with making furniture. It simply describes the sudden downward motion you make when you chop wood – or, as it might be, hit keys or on a keyboard…

Right, eventually found the quote (it’s in the article “Hack_(technology)” ).

Still sounds wrong to me. I am German and I never heard the word “Hacker” be used to describe “someone making furniture with an axe”, though that might of course simply be an extremely archaic term by now…

The original article referenced in the footnote of that article also doesn’t mention German, though.

Surveys are good to take community snapshots for data mining and are very suitable for data mining hence they helps significantly in decision making process. That said there are several important problems with polls – some of them can have quite dangerous consequences. Incidentally this survey has some such problems. And (un)fortunately not necessarily because of its design.
1. Human factors. First of all, the survey’s theme is so complex and some questions involve enough human factors in order to require further explanation. For example, let’s start with the beginning (The question 4 on page 1): “Rate Delphi technology. Excellent, Good,…” (etc.) What means ‘Technology’? …’Excellent’ means that I’m someone who has a let’s say D7 (my last purchase, isn’t it?) and just maintain some applications (ie. 5 bug fixes in 5 months) or someone who fights with D2010 to provide bleeding edge solutions to compete with VS, Java ecosystem etc.?

2. Dictionary. Page 5 – Question 1. Do you know all those ‘Insights’ which are listed there? And, much more dangerous, perhaps someone thinks that knows what a feature does and marks it ‘Don’t Use’ which in fact means “I would use it if it would had that ‘foo’ functionality’ – thing which is lost – the Team will think that the feature is ‘broken / poor / low value’ (etc) – and in most cases the ‘foo’ functionality is already inside (but not discoverable due of most probably GUI design problems) or seeing holistically, the ‘foo’ functionality isn’t really needed but the one who took the survey at that time wasn’t able to figure it out.

3. Size. Too big. But I understand them. Anyway, now is too late to discuss this… (but if the pressure grows perhaps I’ll make a post on the theme)

Being asked to allocate values out of 100 to a long list of choices was bizarre. Had me reaching for my pocket calculator to make sure I got it right. The second time I just chose two or three features, gave them values and moved on.

What also concerns me is the tendency to use technical/insider terms without explanation. Then you have to guess what it might be.

Also, some features really WOULD be useful to, but they don’t work properly (in my version of Delphi), so how do you convey this with these choices? Will Embi have a different evaluation sheet for each version a user selected in the beginning, or will they say, “no-one uses this”?

I don’t disagree and I believe in the future I will change the questions to be more ordered or importance. By the way, I also agree that the poll is long and I hope to break-it-up in the future and do it a little more often than 2 years.

Huhhh …. I just completed the survey (but I’ll gave my thumb down to all those 100% calculation to be performed)…

Anyway, since the “concurent/parallel” feature was quite present in the several places into the survey I just want to point out some really great concurrency presentations made by Rich Hickey (The Clojure’s “Father”) that can enlighten the Delphi programmers on how to realize great parallelism … and also might provide some very good hints/ideas for the Delphi compiler geeks (ex: Allen & Barry) to spice up the Delphi language/RTL.

Hopefully in the next Delphi RTLs (since the last survey and in past also Allen give us some hints on the “parallel” support) we can encounter something similarly simple and powerful like the persistent and reference structures presented by Rich.

My only gripe with the survey (I abandoned it while I thought about how I was going to solve this); I want to tell them that I have bought Rad Studio 2010, but I can’t rate it as I’m not able to use it in any of my projects yet. There ought to be some way to let me differentiate between the last version I bought (ie 2010) and the version I am qualified/experienced enough with to ‘rate’ (in my case, 2007).

I guess I could just tell the poll that I last bought 2007, then enter my thoughts on it (this is what I’ll probably do), but I want Delphi to succeed and I wanted to answer the poll as honestly and supportively as I could. I’ve bought 2010, and I’m keen to use it, but I’m not qualified to comment on any of it at the moment. 🙂